


"Send" & Send-Off

by Liara_90



Series: #Traynorweek2017 [1]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Backstory, Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Canon Lesbian Character, Challenge Response, F/F, Making Out, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 17:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12989298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liara_90/pseuds/Liara_90
Summary: After being accepted at Oxford, Samantha Traynor prepares to leave Horizon. But send-offs are always bittersweet.Written for the #Traynorweek2017 Day 1 Prompt: "Colonist Upbringing".





	"Send" & Send-Off

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully I'll have more of these short stories as the week progresses. Expect 0 tonal consistency.

* * *

Horizon, Iera System

2177

It was a quiet drive out of town, past the virtual lines demarcating the official limits of our little settlement. I didn’t mind the quiet, not normally. It’s one of the things I loved about Rachel: we didn’t need to be filling every spare second with sounds, just because we could. We could have _comfortable_ silences. Not to mention that, since this was technically ‘off-road’ driving, the auto-navigation system didn’t work, so I had to steer the thing manually. I should have been grateful for _both_ our sakes that there wasn’t a lot of chatter to distract me. But I didn’t like the quiet this time.

It was our last drive out together. Seemed like such a waste not to be saying anything.

The message had come through a day ago, and it’d taken me about that long for the adrenal high to wear off. I’d be accepted to an off-world university, on _Earth_ , accepted into a four-year program on the basis of an algorithm I wrote for the new QEC queuing protocols. That after-school project had become my ticket to Oxford itself.

The high had eventually worn off, almost exactly around the time I called Rachel to tell her the news. Here’s the key take-away of the transcript:

S: _(squealing into omni-tool)_ Rach! I got it! I got it accepted to _Oxford_!

R: ( _calmly_ ) That’s amazing news, my love. Are you going to accept?

S: _(confused_ ) Of course! Why wouldn’t I go?

R: (...)

As far as I’m aware, there’s no phrase that’s the opposite of ‘ _every cloud has a silver lining_ ’. ‘Every sunny day brings a splash of skin cancer’, maybe?

There hadn’t really been a lot of doubt, not that I was leaving. Horizon didn’t offer much in the way of postsecondary education, not unless you wanted to become a farmer or a miner (which I did not), and my parents would _never_ have allowed all those years of after-school tutoring be for naught.

Rachel knew that too, of course, just like everyone did. Didn’t stop her from falling in love with me. Didn’t stop me from falling in love right back. You’d think being a FIDE-ranked chess player would keep me from making blunders, wouldn’t you?

The road grew increasingly rocky, so I slowed the car to a halt. Only a short distance to the destination, anyways. Rachel kept looking out the window long after we’d stopped rolling. Wasn’t until I undid my seatbelt that she seemed to realize we were parked.

“We’re here,” I said, a little too softly. “Shall we?”

Rachel nodded, swinging her door open and leaving me scurrying to catch-up. It was autumn in our part of Horizon, about ten above freezing, and the sun was setting. Iera’s a bit more than twice as far away from Horizon as Sol is from Earth, so sunsets aren’t quite as dramatic an affair as in the old vids of the homeworld. The differences in the atmosphere make our sunsets look pinker, too, on a clear night like that one.

I caught up to Rachel a few moments later, grabbing my omni-tool and a blanket and all the things she usually left without. By the time I found her she was already at the cliffside, staring down at our little settlement, legs dangling off the edge of Mount Terminus.

It wasn’t really a _mountain_ , not by any reasonable geological definition. The plate tectonics of Horizon didn’t give us much in the way of the Andes or the Alps. Not really many earthquakes, either, though, which I feel is more than a fair trade. All we had to do was pretend this bulbous little knoll deserved “Mt.” in its name.

“So how’s this going to work?” asked Rachel, once I’d found my spot beside her. I’m _terrified_ of heights - vertigo like you wouldn’t believe - but I never got a whiff of acrophobia when I was on the mount with her. Adolescent hormones, I suppose everyone knows, work miracles.

I pulled out my omni-tool, the haptic displays flashing until the draft sitting in my inbox was in front of us:

... _I would be honoured to accept your offer of admission to the University of Oxford…_

“You just hit _Send_ and you’re in?” She slipped her arm around my shoulders, tugging me a little closer. We were both wearing hoodies - mine an unremarkable black one, hers with the logo of a collegial hockey team - and she had her hood up. It wasn’t that cold out, but that’s how Rachel always liked to wear it. Just a few tufts of hair poking out... 

“Not _quite_ ,” I couldn’t help but correct.

Rachel smiled, so I continued.

“I hit _Send_ , and these few hundred kilobytes of text will be compressed, encrypted with my public key, and transmitted to the nearest cell site, probably the one at 1st and Fulton.” Rachel’s fingers began brushing over the back of my neck. “From there, it’ll be multiplexed and sent over old-fashioned terrestrial fiber-optic to the satellite uplink station.”

She leaned close and placed a kiss on my cheek. “That one?” She made a vague head-bob down the hill, where a few grey and weathered satellite dishes were beckoning to the skies. The hardware was old, bordering on prehistoric, but most colonials adopted a rather strict ‘ _if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it_ ’ mentality. Which was wonderful, because Horizon was not exactly high on the priority list for Alliance telecom hardware.

“No, the one _behind_ it” I replied, teasingly, for there was nothing but a vast expanse of shortgrass prairie beyond. One day our little settlement would no doubt expand into it, putting up more prefabricated housing units and power lines and factories. But for now it was just wilderness, and a few low-bandith antennae protected by a fence.

Rachel nibbled my cheek in annoyance. “Don’t be a smartass,” she said - as if such a thing was possible - “or I’ll have to break-up with you.”

That sickly feeling returned to my stomach, but Rachel just ignored it, pecking with those wonderfully wind-chapped lips of hers. We were saying the breakup was _mutual_ , which I suppose it was, in the sense that Rachel agreed to it. But then, _she_ wasn’t the one packing her bags for England.

I forced myself to keep talking. “Once it reaches the uplink, it’ll be transmitted as a C-band microwave signal - at 6.101 Gigahertz, in all likelihood - up to ColSat-2 in geostationary orbit, a little more than 35,000 kilometers away.”

Her hand was in my hair now, fingers gently combing. “You told me they couldn’t do that on Earth.”

I always loved when she humored me. “Quite true. Too many terrestrial microwave links for C-band, you could never get a clear signal. Out here it’s-”

“-clearer?” Rachel offered. “More peaceful?”

“ _Less busy_ , certainly,” I conceded.

Part of me wondered if those words were a last-ditch effort to keep me on Horizon. Our relationship was in its endgame, we had two kings and a bishop between us. Rachel couldn’t hope to win, but if I slipped up she could perhaps snatch a stalemate.

I shook my head, inwardly and a little outwardly. Rachel’s fingernails gently scraped my scalp. She was a straight-shooter, _honest_ bordering on _blunt_. Part of the reason I loved her, of course, such clarity. Emotional manipulation was anathema to her.

She traced lines on my ear with her thumb. “And then?”

I took a deep breath. “No FTL, sadly, but ColSat-2 will use a laser transmitter to beam my letter halfway across the solar system, relaying it to CADUCEUS-19. Depending on where Horizon and Relay 411 are, relatively speaking, it’ll take between thirty-five and fifty-two minutes to cross space. CADUCEUS-19 will use 411’s mass effect tunnel to pass the message to its older brother, CADUCEUS-17, in Hydra.”

 _Oh, she was kissing me now._ My breath quickened, my pitch rose. “Assuming usual routing, -17 will pass it on to -7 in Pax, and then straight on to Sol. Even with lag and queuing it’ll cross half the galaxy in a few seconds.” Rachel pushed me down a little bit. My right arm was still outstretched, keeping my omni-tool open, even as she began looming over me. “Sol’s trickier to predict - a plethora of routing options, you know - but it’ll probably be flagged as low-priority and get bounced through the FTL comm buoys at Uranus, Titan and Mars, then the usual three-to-twenty-one minutes to actually reach Earth on a lightspeed downlink.”

I was flat on my back, Rachel had one knee on either side of me. She kissed my lips. “You said _your anus_ ,” she mockingly teased.

I rolled my eyes, as much as one could while one’s mouth was covered by another. “I did _not_ ,” I replied, an indignant moment later. I’d kept my parents’ accent, which meant I ( _correctly!_ ) pronounced it ūr′·ə·nəs. But the ancient joke made me smile, anyways.

“What happens at Earth?” Rachel asked, a little disinterestedly, as she unzipped my hoodie. There was a brief flash of _cold_ , but she covered _me_ with _her_ pretty quickly.

“Uhh….” ( _Lips trail from ears to neck_.) “A LEO satellite will relay it back down to earth - _literally_ , to Earth - probably one of the big receiver farms in Australia or Argentina. The segmented packets of my message go through undersea cables, likely making landfall at Widemouth Bay, in Cornwall.” Her hands were slipping under my shirt. I had a few seconds to get the rest out. “And then carried in fiber-optics along the old British Rail easements until it reaches the admin offices at Oxford. A VI will verify my credentials, process my acceptance, add me to the system, and then send me a confirmation largely the same way in reverse.”

I just managed to get that last part of the sentence out before Rachel yanked her own hoodie off. She was only wearing a sports bra beneath it, undeterred by the cold as ever. Rach was absolutely _gorgeous_ , built like an Olympian; she would’ve made an _excellent_ poster child for the Alliance Marines had that not been _antithetical_ to her politics. She lowered herself back onto me, her head tilted to see the draft message still being projected from my omni-tool.

“Then you better not keep them waiting, Sam,” she murmured, her breaths falling on my skin.

I gulped. “You sure?” I don’t know why I asked, not really, but I suppose I still wanted her blessing for the un-union.

She kissed me. “Damn right,” she whispered. “ _Someone_ has to remind those Terrans that colonials aren’t just farm hicks and pirates.”

I smiled. It was a pious little fiction, a white lie to justify my leaving. I’m still glad she gave it. “ _Thank you_ ,” I breathed, and hit _Send_.

The draft blinked out of existence, the little icon in the corner confirming transmission. We both tilted our heads a bit to look at the satellite ground station a few miles away. When I was little, I used to pretend that I could see the signals in the ether, tried to visualize the radio waves and IR lasers flying invisibly all around us.

I still do, I suppose.

Nothing happened, of course. It’s not like in those horrible vids, where you see the antennae glow blue with mystical energy as the signal charges up to be sent, like a ray guy in a bad video game. Nothing had changed at all, as far as my eyes could see.

 _Everything_ , of course, had changed.

“So what now?” I asked, a little dumbly, tilting my head back to stare into Rachel’s eyes.

Her eyes turned away from the satellite station, peering right back into mine. “ _Well_ ,” she said, sinking back so her mouth was at my ear. “If I did my math correctly…” (she probably hadn’t but _shut up Sam!_ ) “...we’ve got a bit less than three hours before you hear back.”

“Pretty much,” I confirmed. Almost certainly less - the planets just weren’t going to be aligned in the most inconvenient way - but for once I didn’t feel like quibbling about the numbers.

“I can think of one or two things to do in the meantime.” Her hand slipped beneath my shirt.

“Care to enlighten me?” I managed to ask.

“Just something for the road,” Rachel clarified, brushing stray hairs out of my eyes. “To remember.”

When the message from Oxford finally came back - two hours and eleven minutes later - I somehow missed it entirely.

**Author's Note:**

> Very much hope someone enjoyed my first entry for [#Traynorweek2017](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/traynorweek2017). As always, feedback, reviews, criticisms, comments, etc., etc. are always appreciated. Feel free to hit me up on [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/user/pvoberstein/) or [Tumblr](http://www.pvoberstein.tumblr.com/). My apologies to anyone who actually understands how telecommunication hardware works, for I do not.


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